Title

Author

Date of Award

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Electrical/Computer Engineering

Committee Director

Oscar R. Ganzález

Committee Member

W. Steven Gray

Committee Member

Dimitrie Popescu

Abstract

In order to improve aircraft flight control system development life cycle, new flight control techniques are being explored to allow the system to ``learn-to-fly" with limited a priori information of the aircraft's aerodynamic characteristics. One approach is to have a system identification process operating on-the-fly to generate mathematical models which can be used to update control laws. In this thesis, a wind tunnel experiment was conducted with a model aircraft set up to be free-to-roll, so system identification and control methods could be explored for a one-degree-of-freedom case. In particular this thesis covers the design of a novel control system that uses mathematical models of a predetermined form with certain unknown parameters to achieve satisfactory roll control for the free-to-roll experiment. The mathematical model was updated on-the-fly by a separate process that is outside of the scope of this thesis, which performs system identification in real-time.